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Without God

Media – The Pilgrim’s Progress

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s taken from one of the most famous allegories in the English language … Pilgrim’s Progress… a tale about a man called Christian on a journey from The City of  Destruction to the Celestial City – basically his ‘progress’ from this world to the world to come. Christian has just won a hard-fought victory against the Devil, and as you can hear, he meets all sorts of characters along the way who represent the various encouragements, trials and temptations he’s likely to come across. This particular retelling is an animation created in 2019 starring John Rhys-Davies (Gimli from The Lord of the Rings), and directed by Robert Fernandez, who does a valiant job of colouring in this classic tale for 21st-century kids. Pilgrim’s Progress, written by John Bunyan, was first published in 1678, and it’s never gone out of print! In fact, since then, it’s been translated into more than two hundred languages. Bunyan was a Christian author and non-conformist English preacher. If you can believe it, in his time, preaching in England without a licence from the Church of England could land you in jail – too right!! – and for Bunyan, it did. He actually began writing Pilgrim’s Progress in Bedfordshire County Prison during a 12-year stint for holding unapproved religious services. Christianity has a rich association with allegories – stories, pictures and poems that can be interpreted to reveal hidden meanings. Our episode on Dante’s Divine Comedy last season is one of the best-known examples. Check out episode 163; link in the show notes. And shortly after his conversion to Christianity, C.S. Lewis began writing his own version of Bunyan’s classic  … which Lewis called, The Pilgrim’s Regress, about a man meeting the philosophies of his time. 

Reading

“There must be a good side somewhere to this [technological] revolution,” said Vertue. “It is too solid – it looks too lasting – to be a mere evil. I cannot believe that the Landlord would otherwise allow the whole face of nature and the whole structure of life to be so permanently and radically changed.” The Guide laughed. “You are falling into their own error,” he said, “the change is not radical, nor will it be permanent. That idea depends on a curious disease which they have all caught – an inability to disbelieve advertisements.“To be sure, if the machines did what they promised, the change would be very deep indeed. Their next war, for example, would change the state of their country from disease to death. They are afraid of this themselves, though most of them are old enough to know by experience that a gun is no more likely than a toothpaste or a cosmetic to do the things its makers say it will do. It is the same with all their machines. Their labour-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent: their amusements bore them: their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving time have banished leisure from their country.“There will be no radical change. And as for permanence – consider how quickly all machines are broken and obliterated. The black solitudes will some day be green again, and of all cities that I have seen these iron cities will break most suddenly.”

John Dickson (Studio)

Well, my guest today has had his own crack at this well-tried genre of describing the inner spiritual journey by telling the tale of a physical journey. He would be the first to say he makes no claims to be in the same league as Dante, Bunyan, or Lewis … But I don’t mind saying … it’s pretty darn good! But it’s not about the Christian journey … from infancy to maturity. It’s about a modern secular journey through all of the isms available to us today. It’s the story of life without God. I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson (Studio)

My guest today is, of course, a writer – but he’s also a philosopher. Dr Chris Palmer is Dean and Associate Professor at Barnett College at Southeastern University. He specialises in questions of meaning, nihilism, and suffering … which, of course, sounds depressing … but he’s actually all about hope. He’s written ten books, including his most recent, A World Without God: The Search for Meaning in a Society Overwhelmed by Despair. It’s not a dissertation or a textbook full of arguments – it’s an allegorical walk through a town called Novemberton.

John Dickson:
I wanna begin with just the sort of obvious question, uh, why you wrote this book as a kind of parable instead of a, uh, philosophical argument?

Chris Palmer:
Yeah, you know, I felt that the way that philosophy is best situated is to move it away from the abstract and to put it into our personal lives. I’ve read a lot of dense philosophy. This book is for people who are not particularly familiar with dense philosophy, but should be. And uh, you know, many times I’ve read through, uh, very thick books. And when you finally begin to process it, you have that aha moment later where you say, oh, I really want somebody to catch what I’m saying. And if you bring it to them and present it to them in the way that you had to process through it, they’ll never get it. They don’t have the time for it. So my thought was. Let’s move this into someone’s day-to-day life and bring this through, uh, in a story or in a parable sort of format. And what I wanted to see is that the most important philosophy takes shape in our everyday lives. So why not construct characters in a town where that, uh, philosophy moves lives and breeze? And hopefully I was able to do that with the town of Novemberton.

Reading

That night, Novemberton came to me. Not as a dream. Not as a sermon. As a town shaped by absence, unsettled and at times absurd. A place where people still reach but don’t know what for. Where faith isn’t mocked, just forgotten. Misplaced. This book isn’t a map. It’s a walk through that town. Through questions. Through weariness. Through a chaos that doesn’t care. Godless. Listening, but not hearing. Novemberton is imagined, but it is not unreal. It is a place built from questions, sorrow, fragments of culture, and the fading outlines of faith. At its core, the darkness isn’t the absence of God but the absence of our sight.

Chris Palmer – A World Without God

Chris Palmer:
Novemberton is a town where people are in desperate search for meaning. Uh, the book begins by talking about how we’re living in the nihilistic age. Nihilism is a feeling of meaninglessness. So if we start with the presumption that people are in search of meaning. And the town is exhausted.

John Dickson (Studio)

“Nihilism” comes from the Latin nihil — meaning “nothing.” It describes what happens when older sources of meaning collapse and nothing solid replaces them. It doesn’t really have a beginning. But the name most closely linked with nihilism is the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. More on him in a sec. Back to Novemberton.

Chris Palmer:
In this search, there are those that use their influence to find it. There are those that relate to everyday pleasures to find meaning. There are those that look to rational thinking to find meaning, and at the end of the day we find that all of these ways are exhausted, and the town is wondering, can it successfully get along without God? And that’s where I bring in the concept that a world without God is something that we have talked ourselves into and how we’re trying to talk ourselves out of it. And how do we ground the idea of God and what importance does God have and the structures of our lives?

John Dickson:
The first-person narrator wanders through this town called Novemberton, um, into cafes, university, uh, lecture halls, uh, and finally, uh, an empty church. Um, it’s, it’s a lovely device, I must say. I liked it. Um, but the, the, the theme of Novemberton, right?  I’m assuming that comes from the Moby Dick, uh, reference to No, you know, November, which, which you cite in the book.

Reading

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

John Dickson:
 But did you think about the, uh, the people in the Southern Hemisphere my friend? I mean, ’cause November is awesome. November’s like, here’s the promise of summer!

Chris Palmer:
It’s true. I, I would have to put an asterisk, if I could go back, I’d put an asterisk down there and say, uh, pretend you’re in the Northern Hemisphere here in the uk or in, in the

 John Dickson:
You might have to call it Mayton. Look, um, Novemberton as a town is not hostile to God. Uh, it’s just quietly post. God post everything really is, is that how you see, uh, the current situation?

Chris Palmer:
I do see it that way. I think the age of militant atheism under the four horsemen, I mean the four horsemen they had, they rode hard. 

John Dickson (Studio)

We’ve mentioned “The Four Horsemen” before — Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. The nickname riffs on the Four devastating Horsemen in Revelation 6, which has always struck me as weird because those original horsemen were fighting on God’s behalf, not against God. Anyway, they rose to prominence after 9/11, arguing that faith was dangerous for the world. But it’s interesting that it now seems clear it was a bit of a fashion. That sort of strident atheism has lost some of its momentum. The cultural mood has shifted.

Chris Palmer:
There are reasons to explain why their popularity, I believe, has diminished. And now I think that it’s not that people are protesting God, it’s sort of they’ve just forgotten God or they God is something that is there, sort of there, maybe there not hostile. If you like it, great. It’s more of a passive attitude towards divinity and towards transcendence. Neither for or against it. If it works for you, you can try it, but yet not at the same time, something that I desperately need, or it must be the structure of my life or my life is going to unravel. And so, uh, the town is presented as a town that is just quietly agnostic and doing what’s right for themselves.

John Dickson (Studio)

Agnosticism, strictly speaking, is the view that the truth about God is unknowable. The term was coined in the 19th century by T.H. Huxley, during a period when reason was seen as the final judge of what we can know–and can’t! These days, agnostic is often used more loosely: I’m open — I’m just not convinced. In a 2024 Pew Research Centre study, 28 per cent of adults in America fell into the ‘nones’ category, with 20 per cent explicitly identifying as agnostic. The numbers across Europe are similar. The instinct isn’t new – ancient sceptics raised similar doubts. But the numbers are new! There’s a lot of … Yeah, I don’t know … out there!

Reading

To understand Novemberton, you have to acquaint yourself with the important observation that Dietrich Bonhoeffer made about the world he knew. Bonhoeffer lived in the early twentieth century. During his thirty-nine years of life … a lot of scientific and engineering advances were taking place. Big ones. The electron had just been discovered. Einstein developed his theory of relativity. The Wright brothers and Lindbergh took flight. The Empire State Building went up. The Hoover Dam was completed. People were getting into Model Ts. Scientific progress and civil engineering led to the development of the A-bomb that fell over Japan just 119 days after Bonhoeffer’s death. Bonhoeffer described his world as a world that had “come of age.” To come of age means to grow up and mature. As a result, you no longer need the things you needed while you were young. Think of a child who takes off her training wheels. Bonhoeffer believed the world had grown, and that it would soon put its training wheels on the shelf.

 John Dickson:
You say a quote in Novemberton, “Everyone has come of age, and that’s, uh, that’s got a little double whammy there. Can you explain it to us?

Chris Palmer:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that in a time of modernization, we’ve come of age. What he means by that is there’s no longer that enchantment in life where we look to God to fill the gaps. What people are looking for to fill the gaps are rational explanations of why this is. And so the faith project or the idea of Christianity or faith in and of itself has deferred to an adult-like thinking where we want empiricism and rationalism and scientific observation to replace the mystery that we have in life. And so when looking for explanations, it’s, it’s with, well, how can we explain it scientifically or empirically? And there’s little room in that coming of age for wonder. And I think that the modern project has made little room for wonder to where the deep things of life need to have clear explanations and very few loose ends. And that’s what it’s like to come of age where you have some sort of, uh, adult-like explanation for things. But the problem with that is, John, uh, life doesn’t fit into those neat explanations. And when it doesn’t, there tends to be, uh, a blowback to it. And I think that’s sort of where we find ourselves.

 John Dickson:
And the residents of Novemberton, as a result of this have, uh, what one could strictly call nihilism, the sort of nothingness, meaninglessness. But it’s not. The anguished nihilism that people sometimes associate with that word. You’ve got two versions of it for us, so explain it for us. There’s the “meh whatever”, and then there’s the activity, activity, activity. Tell us, talk us through both those approaches.

Chris Palmer:
Yeah, so Nietzsche talks about active and passive nihilism. The passive nihilists is going to roll over and die and just kind of accept the meaninglessness that’s in life and the active nihilist is gonna be strong and try to build their own values.

John Dickson (Studio)

Like I promised — a word about Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th-century German classicist and philosopher – with an awesome moustache! He wrote some very influential books: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morals. He believed Western culture was drifting toward nihilism because belief in God — and absolute moral truth — was collapsing. And in that kind of world, you’ve basically got two options: create your own meaning — or sink into apathy.

Chris Palmer:
Now there’s a fine line between those two, but sometimes it doesn’t always shake out as clear as which one is active or passive. I didn’t want to try to get into, you know, forming a taxonomy of nihilism in the book, but I will say, you know, there’s the it, that attitude does show up. For instance, I put the active nihilist as a protestor who in the beginning of the book, she’s scrolling through her phone and there’s a, a, a time delay to where she, he, the, the character, the first person in character later sees her. And she’s picketing and she’s protesting. And so she’s seeking to fill the void of meaninglessness, which was, uh, incited by the death of a child, by protesting and pulling down other people’s values. So one could say she has that active nihilism role where she’s trying to destroy other people’s values and erect the world that she thinks that everyone else should live in, which would be more of an active nihilist. And that’s. A push back against the feeling of meaninglessness, incited by suffering. And then there’s the, the passive nihilist, uh, that I’ve, uh, kind of contrasted. And he’s a DoorDash delivery driver. 

Reading

[He’s] cruising the streets in a red 2010 Ford Fiesta. On his bumper, a sticker that elicited smirks, said, “Still here. Still confused. Still driving.” Unmoved by the town’s panic, he delivered hamburgers, oversized burritos, and buffalo wings with ranch to residents huddling in fear of the next victim. His reputation rested on his strangely passionate, oddly detached approach to feeding the town. As awkward as his car, he was known for his poorly timed conversations at the door. It wasn’t unusual for him to say things like, “Enjoy the dumplings, they could be your last.” Some customers requested another driver to avoid another tangent on how aliens built the pyramids. Clearly a podcast junkie—his oversized headphones never left his ears—he likely unwound with Reddit after work.

Chris Palmer:
And, you know, he’s, he’s, he’s the hero in the story who’s bringing Chinese takeout to the people who are in quarantine, their house. And, uh, you know, we find him outside of a, of a, uh, a gas station mini mart. And the way that he deals with nihilism is he buys energy drinks and he gets tobacco and nicotine, I should say, and sits in his car with a jumbo hotdog. And he, he makes memes, uh, to laugh in order to keep from crying. And, and this kind of speaks to the individual online that, uh, is so dismissed, is so dismayed by life. That they find themselves on Reddit posting memes about how they’re no different than an animal and I can’t, I’m, I’m gonna bed rot and I’m gonna look at brain rot and AI slop because that’s what life is. And that’s how people I think, tend to deal with their meaningless and meaninglessness or that feeling of that. What I think is a real shift away from the days when, you know, I was in high school and college and everyone was listening to the Four Horsemen and they wanted to challenge, uh, faith. Today, it’s just more, uh, one or the other.

John Dickson (Studio)

So, where do we go if we want to find some meaning or at least vitality in life? Next, Chris takes us to a university where a lecture is in progress on the foundations of Human Religion. Stay with us.

Media – Bruce Almighty

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s the brilliant physical comedian Jim Carey, struggling under the weight of prayer requests that come his way when he steps into the shoes of God – memorably played by Morgan Freeman. Bruce tries to cope with the world’s prayers requests by transforming them into email, only to discover that the information is coming in far faster than he can cope with. It’s a wonderful bit of fantasy, until you realise that we’re all in Bruce’s shoes, trying to cope with a seemingly endless flow of information. Here’s an amazing statistic (quoted in Chris Palmer’s book but comes from the Journal of Information Science. In the 20th century a  single weekly edition of the New York Times contained more information than the average seventeenth-century English person would have encountered in their entire lifetime. Between 1998 and 2000, the number of documents online doubled from 400 million to 800 million – meaning it would take about 200-thousand years to read the Internet. In 2010 the world was home to around two zetabytes of information – a zetabyte is a trillion gigabytes – Director Mark assures me! By 2025 those two zetabytes had exploded to 181 zetabytes – an increase of six-thousand, three-hundred percent. And by 2028, it’s going to be a staggering 394 zetabytes. The point isn’t the exact number. It’s that we are awash in information. It’s too much. And it’s not good for us. Chris calls it infobesity.

Chris Palmer:
So, infobesity is the height of modernisation. I mean, we started modernising. And looking at ourselves as progressing towards human solutions to the human experiment. Infobesity represents sort of the height of that where we are now all connected through the internet with massive, massive, massive amounts of information, uh, coming at us so quickly that none of us can process it, and it’s coming at us so quickly that we can’t process it. And you know, I use the term the devaluation of values because none of it is categorised by importance. It all begins to feel meaningless. I mean, for instance, if I shared this example recently. I was looking at Instagram, and I noticed a post of a friend that I went to in high school who had died, and seconds later, it was replaced by a video of a raccoon eating a Poptart. And so the sacred, it’s absurd. It’s ironic, it’s sad, but it’s ironic. And, you know, there’s really no categorization for what’s important or what’s not. So everything becomes valueless. And what I argue in the book is that that has eroded our sense of what’s valuable and, and what’s not valuable, and, uh, has really got at our meaning and has caused a crisis of, of what’s important. So it represents the height of modernization. And my suggestion is I, I use Charles Taylor’s work where Charles Taylor says that in this, we’re haunted by the ghost of the feast. We’re haunted by nihilism, the meaninglessness, because we try to believe something, but when it comes down to it, we ask ourselves if there’s a hundred voices shouting at us, why do we believe this one? Instead of the other one. And so what causes is two things. A, we just give up, or B, we radicalize. And so there’s the, I’m gonna give up or I’m gonna radicalise. And where does the epistemic courage come from to believe something and to hold onto it. And so, uh, we have passive and active nihilism and, and they’re going in complete opposite directions. And it’s left us, you know, all feeling relatively exhausted. And so this, uh, I think brings to light where we’ve gotten to in, in the, uh, world without God project. And, and, you know, it’s, it’s haunting at times and feels like, uh, the ghost of the feast and Macbeth who’s calling out to us and we can’t seem to shaken.Where do we go?

 John Dickson:
The other people in inverted commas that appear. In the book are the great philosophers. And, and the way you do this is you, the narrator or whoever the narrator is, first person narrator, walks into, you know, libraries, takes books off the shelf and, and sort of reflects, right? So, can you just give us a sense of who you reckon are the big names that in the end have given us Novemberton?

Chris Palmer:
So the narrator is first-person recusing through the town. He finds himself in a library and he’s trying to find out who killed God. And that comes of course, from Nietzsche’s Parable of the Madman, where Nietzsche diagnoses the modern age by saying that modernisation has killed God.

John Dickson (Studio)

The Parable of the Madman is probably Nietzsche’s most famous allegory. A madman runs into a marketplace yelling that he is looking for God. The people in the town mock him. Then we pick up the madman, saying:

Reading

“Where is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? … What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? … Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? … God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

John Dickson (Studio)

Nietzsche isn’t really celebrating the death of God. He himself believes there is no such thing as God. He reckons Christianity was a pernicious, weakening force compared to ancient Greek philosophy. But he also knows that the death of God from our consciousness means there’s no divine order behind reality, no objective moral bedrock, and no inherent value to life! And who knows where that leads!!!!

Chris Palmer:
It wasn’t something that he wanted. In fact, he feared it. He feared humankind  was not gonna have the strength to move on from religion. And he was wondering what would fill the void. Bonhoeffer had the exact same, uh, diagnosis of culture and while Nietzsche was saying we should construct our own values, Bonhoeffer calls us to cruciform living into the cross. And so I’m putting these two ideas into sort of a reckoning and how it plays out by starting with Nietzsche and most of the chapters and showing people that try to fill the void with their own, um, ways of going about it. And so we get to, uh, chapter five, where Dostoevsky’s darkest characters show up and, uh, the, the, the first person narrator, you know, he goes through to, to a lecture at a university and the lecture’s called the Principles, uh, for human religion, uh, lectures on principles for human religion.

Reading

Up ahead, the university gates appear—iron and ivy bound. I pause, the cold gnawing at my knuckles, my scarf a little suffocating. I step toward Furman Hall, grateful for an escape from the cold. I pass a man smoking beneath a flickering streetlight. His eyes are red. His phone glows in his hand, but he’s not touching it. Just watching. Waiting. For what, I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t either. Perhaps this lecture will offer clarity; something meaningful might finally emerge, or perhaps it’s just another cycle, another turn around the prickly pear. The lobby of the hall is abuzz with anticipation. Backpacks rustle as students scroll their phones and chat with one another and wait for the doors to the lecture to open. The smells of coffee, gum, and damp fabric hang in the air. I’m surprised that so many have shown up. The flyer hadn’t promised anything exciting; “The Principles for a Human Religion” is hardly a rock concert. I’d expected apathy, but hardly a crowd

Chris Palmer:
And the four characters from Dostoevsky who are sitting on the stage in almost a dreamlike world, and they’re clearly dead. And they’re retelling their life stories. All uniquely nihilistic. All, uh, have thought I would say are principled nihilists who are trying to create a world without God and what’s clear as they begin to tell their stories in a very modern way. Uh, but based on the books is that it undoes their psychology, and their psychology begins to unravel and, you know, they are talking to one another.

John Dickson (Studio)

Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of the giants of 19th-century Russian literature. In novels like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, he probed the darker corners of the human soul — guilt, freedom, rebellion, despair. Like Nietzsche’s madman, Dostoevsky created characters who expose what happens when faith collapses. In an 1864 essay, Socialism and Christianity, he warned that Europe had abandoned the Christian command, “Love your neighbour as yourself,” and replaced it with colder slogans — “Every man for himself,” or even the scientific language of struggle and survival. For Dostoevsky, once God is removed, something in the moral centre begins to fracture. I suspect he would have recognised Novemberton immediately. 

Chris Palmer:
So there’s a, there’s a re-imagination of there. And so what it’s supposed to do is, if you’re familiar with Dostoevsky, you may appreciate it. If you’re not familiar with Dostoevsky, it may awaken you that, Hey, we, we need to read this literature because the world without God project has been done and it is clearly failed. And this is not necessarily based on, uh, you’ll, you’ll see it’s not based on anything rational. And then we move to the final argument, uh, in chapter six, where the underground man shows up and, and he’s a very quirky guy, right? He, I, I set him in the story as the campus it, right? He is on campus, but nobody really knows who he is.

Reading

And just when I think I can’t take any more, I notice him. A hunched figure creeps along the edge of the courtyard. He mutters to himself, snickering like a kid who’s hidden all the staplers in the university and can’t wait for the fallout. He’s dishevelled, fidgety, and sunk in on himself like a collapsing tent. He slips into a side door just outside the streetlight. I follow. Of course I do. There’s something about him, absurd and slightly terrifying, but I’m gripped.

Chris Palmer:
He’s very socially awkward. His office is kind of a broom closet. There’s chips and, uh, snack things everywhere, and he’s writing emails and he never sends those emails. And that’s sort of in the book, uh, notes from underground. He writes letters, but it’s beyond him to actually send the letters. And so there’s this, the, the whole idea is to say that he is, he believes the problem is that. Philosophy is logical, and he’s an example that people are illogical and illogical people don’t fit into rational, logical philosophies. And so, uh, you begin to see as he tells his three stories from the book, that he falls apart as well. And so by chapter seven, you’re left hopeless. And then in chapter seven, Albert Camus comes into the picture and a plague shows up in town.

John Dickson (Studio)

We’ve mentioned Albert Camus before. He was a French-Algerian novelist and philosopher writing in the mid-20th century. I’ve always had a soft spot for him. Unlike many modern atheists, he really knew his Christian history. When I first read The Rebel, I was struck by how fluently he handled the Gospels, the Gnostics, Augustine, even German New Testament scholarship. In 1947 he wrote a novel titled La Peste – The Plague. It tells the story of a bubonic plague outbreak in the Algerian city of Oran. A whole cast of characters emerges: activists, believers, sceptics, ordinary decent people — each trying to respond to suffering in their own way. At first, they hope it will pass. But death becomes routine. Exhaustion sets in. And there’s occasional heroism. Tragically, love becomes a distant memory. Eventually the plague recedes — as mysteriously as it arrived. But the doctor who has quietly narrated the story warns them: the bacteria never really disappear. They lie dormant. They can return. Camus wasn’t just writing about disease. He was exploring suffering and tyranny — and the limits of reason in the face of it. Chris does something similar in Novemberton.

Chris Palmer:
And this is talking about Albert Camus The Plague. And the first person narrator is left wondering, okay, well we, we, we don’t have rational philosophy to give us much comfort for the answers of life. But when tragedy strikes, I used the quote from Camus the plague. It came not for revolutionary or for prisoner first, but for a child.

Reading

A child. No more than five. He’s taken from the ambulance, half shielded by the distress around him. His eyes, wide beneath an oversized oxygen mask, are too still for a child’s face. Fragile, he clutches his teddy bear, so tightly that his knuckles are white. A paramedic, in the kind of suit I’ve seen only in movies, waves frantically to clear the doors. And for a second, the noise rises so sharply it becomes static. Then drops out entirely. Just flashing lights, the stretcher vanishing into glass, and the terrible sound of nothing. The murmuring dies down, but its ghost lingers—stifled sobs, sentences trailing off before they’re done. We stand outside the hospital under the black sky. Fluorescent light spills from the windows. A few people lean against the brick, but most just stand still. No one looks at each other when they speak. Nobody prays, but nobody leaves. The collective realisation has settled in—that a child’s suffering is the one thing that cannot be ignored, the one horror that demands explanation, and the one silence that should never be left unbroken.

Chris Palmer:
Who is holding a teddy bear and squeezing it to where his knuckles are white and he has a mask on his face and it’s, it’s a very descriptive scene. And the narrator says, just yesterday this boy was on the playground trading fruit snacks with his friends and telling his friends that his mom and dad were gonna take him to see the otters at the zoo. I think that line is my favorite line in the book because it really goes back to a moment that I remember when I was in a, um, pastoral position and a friend of mine had a brother who had cancer, and I went over to their house one day to see them. And the brother who had cancer was telling me how he couldn’t wait for his wrestling video game to come by us post so that he could play it. And all he talked about was this video game. We’d move from subject to subject, but he, he’d go look out the window and wait for the video game to come. He’d go wait for the video game to come. And then two days later, I got a call that just the night prior to that. He had been rushed to the hospital and because of medical complications, he had died. And I could not help but think about that video game for whatever reason. That’s what made me just inquire the most and I didn’t ask about it. Try not to be sensitive. But his sister, who was my friend, said to me, and you won’t believe it, we got home from the hospital after he had died. And on the doorstep was the video game. And I remember that being so existential, that video game, something tangible and material connecting me and making me think about the bigger questions or the the odyssey of life. And so that is a nod. The otters in the book is a nod to that individual who experienced that suffering.

John Dickson (Studio)

A World Without God then shifts to the various ways society tries to cope with suffering.

John Dickson:
Talk us through the four characters, uh, who sort of carry with them the different strategies for coping with this … death of meaning, the death of the boy.

Chris Palmer:
Naturally there is a, a wide backlash to the death of the boy because he’s the first person to die. So it focuses on that. The first individual is the protestor, and this individual has been clearly radicalised online and they are going to destroy somebody and make somebody responsible for the death of this child, and they are gonna stop at no limit to do that. And they find purpose, and they find meaning at making somebody and holding somebody accountable for the innocent child’s death. The second individual in the story, uh, is the DoorDash delivery driver who is so overwhelmed by the death of this child that he relates to humour. And I talk about 9 11 humor. I talk about dark humor that’s clearly, by a lot of people’s estimation, inappropriate, but it’s so dark and it crosses so many lines. And if you get behind sort of the, the, the motivation, it’s, it’s a coping mechanism. And again, you know, he finds himself in his car. He has a meme page that nobody really follows, and he just makes fun of stuff and to, to laugh and it is pretty therapeutic for him. The third individual is, um, an influencer. And this is sort of where the virtue signalling comes in. We’re gonna raise money for this, this child and raise money for their family, I should say. And clearly using the, uh, opportunity to monetise and build their own platform and their own influence. And I  would, you know, suggest this is probably closer to active nihilism, and I’m gonna build my world and my brand, and my platform, clearly being insensitive. But at the, and you know, you’re reading it, and you’re thinking this is clearly insensitive, but at the same time, very relatable. It’s what we see, you know, taking place. And then my favorite in the book, uh, is the journalist. I really feel a very strong connection to the journalist, uh, as I wrote him in it, and the journalist, he maybe wants to believe in God, maybe doesn’t wanna believe in God, but he’s thought, he’s clearly thought about it more than the other three. And he’s given,

John Dickson:
He thinks its good for society if nothing else.

Chris Palmer:
If nothing else, he thinks religion is good for society. So we could say perhaps a cultural Christian of sorts, or,  and, and this brings him to a time where he was stationed in ba uh, Basel, Switzerland. And he stands before dos a painting that Doki did before, which is the dead Christ, and he, he relates the experience that he had with this painting, which goes back to Dostoevsky’s second wife’s journals who talks about how Dostoevsky felt when he stood in front of that painting. Which was the actual painting that caused Dostoevsky to write about it in his novel, The Idiot.

John Dickson (Studio)

Hans Holbein the Younger painted The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb around 1521. It’s life-size. Stark. Disturbing. Check it out in the show notes. It’s utterly compelling – but I couldn’t look at it for more than about 10 seconds. Jesus lies rigid on a stone slab — greenish, gaunt, visibly dead. No angels. No glow. No hint of resurrection. Holbein forces you to sit with the body — and with the question: If God truly died, is resurrection really possible? Most religious art rushes to triumph. Holbein makes you wait. And that waiting — without certainty — is how Chris approaches the subject.

Chris Palmer:
And it moves the journalist to say, Hey, I’m going to have to make a decision here. Do we want a world with God or a world without God? Especially when we find the universe is not answering us back when we are disappointed. Because gifts show up on our doorstep that, you know, we’re intended for a child that innocently died of cancer, and a child who’s trading fruit snacks and wants to see the otters. Do we wanna answer these with metaphysical proof or with hope? Because you can’t have both.

John Dickson (Studio)

So, where is hope in Novemberton? Stay with us.

Break 2

John Dickson (Studio)

For many people today — especially across Australia and the UK — the church building on the corner feels like a monument to another age. If it’s not physically run-down, it can feel culturally overgrown — like something preserved rather than alive. A relic. Almost a mausoleum. And it doesn’t help that some churches literally have graveyards in their grounds!! Occasionally, someone walking past might feel a flicker of the old question: I wonder if there is more to life? But for most people, that’s not a question they expect to have answered in a building like that. In Novemberton, the local church carries that same weight. It stands. It’s not hostile. It’s just… quiet. And it becomes the setting for the final scenes of Chris’s story. He handles it really well.

Reading

We pass the corner near the café, where it all began … We stop. St. Bartholomew’s. The church is smaller than I remember. Moss, damp and thick, spreads across its walkway. The ash-gray granite shows only the slow persistence of weather. I climb the steps. The old bulletin board still hangs beside the door. I hadn’t noticed the cracks in the glass last time. Tiny fractures, spidering out from the corner. It hasn’t changed much, but standing here again, I realize that I have. The driver keeps his hands on the wheel. His voice, when it comes, is low. “These bells don’t toll no more,” he says. “Stopped a long time ago.” He doesn’t wait for a response, doesn’t turn. Just drives off, leaving the moment open. I stand for a moment, watching the taillights disappear into the morning haze. Then I turn back to the church.

John Dickson (Studio)

This is where A World Without God gets super personal.  Chris tells me this chapel scene was inspired by his own encounter with suffering and sacred space.

Chris Palmer:
It was 2023 where I got a call that my mom was sick and. I would have to say goodbye to her. And um, I remember living in Tennessee and driving to Michigan clearly devastated ’cause I had just gotten off the phone with my mom two days before that. I went up into the hospital room, and my mom wasn’t a coma and I was doing a PhD at the very end of it on theodicy and  suffering. And I remember as I was leaving the hospital that cold night, what pulled at me was the silence of the hospital chapel. And I remember sitting in that hospital chapel with all the questions of faith that all of us have. And what drew me to the chapel was the manger scene that was there. The incarnation of Christ. When we go back to the last chapter of the book, I draw on that, not because I want it to be a personal quest and a memoir, that’s not why I did it, but I, I feel that we all had our moments where what draws at us is the possibility, even the hope of religion that calls to us in the darkest moments of our life. Where our deepest engagements with Nietzsche and Fuco and all the philosophers we may have read don’t seem to strike a chord and are unable to answer. There’s something about the enchantment of religion that’s good for the soul, but not only is good for the soul, but it’s convincing to the soul. ] And so the individual sits there in that chapel and considers. What Novemberton looks like, feels like. And what I say is that the weight of nihilism is so heavy that the only thing that can bear it is not the human will. The only thing that can bear it are the arches and the pillars of the church. And that’s why they find themselves back in the church that had so long been abandoned. And to make it even more relatable, there’s a hymn no on the pew. With the words to Silent Night, a song that we all know and they all, we all love and quite fittingly the story. John, it ends at Christmas. It ends at Christmas, and the meaning and the purpose of Christmas and why the world feels so joyful and celebratory because it, it, it seems as though we get to have an escape from our modern ways. And reimagine things. We’re all clearly enchanted at Christmas. We think about, even if we’re not thinking about the Christian story, we think about fairytales and Santa Claus and slaves, and it makes us all happy and joyful. And I don’t think I, I, I just, this is where I really kind of come at Nietzche and say, I disagree with you. I don’t think the human soul is strong enough. I think maybe he has that part right, that we’re not strong enough. Nobody’s strong enough to bear the weight of nihilism, and that’s why. We have the church, and I use an illustration of a, there’s a columnist himself, another columnist, uh, who gave up on atheism. He said that he is turning atheism to ash for Lent. And the reason why I believe that there is such a hunger, there is a rebirth in the belief in God. And that’s because we’re tired and we’re exhausted, and we’re not meant to bear this weight and every day. That we are flooded with in Infobesity. It’s a reminder that modernism is not the answer, and that when we stand before the dead Christ, we have to decide, do we want a Jesus that stays in the grave or do we want a Jesus that has come out of the grave? And that’s the crucial question culture’s asking today.

John Dickson (Studio)

Let’s press ‘pause’. I’ve got a five-minute Jesus for you. So many of Jesus’ statements seem to speak directly into our moment. I suppose that’s why we call them timeless. They speak to every moment. Here are just two … In John chapter 8, Jesus says: “If you remain in my teaching, you are truly my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” We tend to feel quietly proud of ourselves today. We are the information-rich generation. We carry more knowledge in our pockets than entire civilisations once possessed. There’s that striking statistic from the Journal of Information Science suggesting that a single edition of the New York Times contains more information than a person might have encountered in a lifetime three hundred years ago. The temptation, when we hear that, is to imagine the past is populated by simpletons — we ourselves as the climax of history. We forget the inconvenient truth that three hundred years from now, they’ll say the same thing about us. And here’s what strikes me as a student of history: data is not the same as wisdom. Information is not the same as truth. In many ways, people in the seventeenth century — the eleventh century — even the fifth century BC — saw things more clearly than we do. They knew how to think slowly. They prized friendship. They treasured community. Information doesn’t automatically free us. Often it burdens us. It can paralyse us. But if the teaching of Jesus is truth — and yes, you might need to listen to all previous 160 episodes of Undeceptions to see why I think it is — then it is more precious than all the data on my iPhone. In Matthew 11, Jesus says:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Rest. It’s such a beautiful word. And such a needed one. We actually did a whole episode on the science and theology of rest — one of my favourites. It almost changed my life. But here’s what strikes me: Jesus says learning from him leads to rest. In historical context, he was almost certainly taking a gentle swipe at the Pharisees. They had counted the commandments of the Old Testament — 613 of them — and then built detailed traditions around them as protective fences. Thousands and thousands of instructions.  They insisted their intricate duties signalled God’s involvement in every area of life, including in things like the correct way to wash your hands. Yes, there is an 11-page account in the Mishnah of how to wash your hands. The intention was serious: to honour God in every part of life. But Jesus declared it a ‘burden’. Against that backdrop, Jesus’ teaching was remarkable in its simplicity. He frequently gave summary statements of his teaching … Stuff like … Love God with all your heart. Love your neighbour as yourself. Everything else hangs on that. And then he gave the theological foundation for this: “Be merciful, just as your heavenly Father is merciful.” Notice the order. We don’t show mercy to earn enough points to receive mercy from God. We show mercy because God has already been merciful to us. That’s why his yoke is easy.  That’s why his burden is light. That’s why we find rest for our souls. That’s what he meant when he said, “Come to me … and I will give you rest.” It’s a truth that can set you free. You can press ‘play’ now.

John Dickson:
In that final chapter you have, you have a, an extended meditation on the incarnation. you know, because, because of the stained glass window, it’s, it’s the Christmas scene. It’s, it’s God becoming man,Why does that particular idea of God taking on flesh, um, stand as a kind of pointer to a resolution?

Chris Palmer:
It goes back to what Carl Bart says in Dogmatics. He said that humans can choose to be godless. But God refuses to be manless or humanless. God in the incarnation made a decision to be with humankind. That’s Emmanuel – ‘God With Us.’ In the book of Matthew, the story starts with Emmanuel. The story ends with I’m with you always. There is in the incarnation, a embodied promise of God to be with us from beginning. To the end, and it represents that in Novemberton, the narrator asks themselves, was he with us the whole time? So where you find out that is dreary, as Novemberton has been, there still was a church, there still was stained glass, there still was a church bell. God has remained with that town and calls that town back to himself. And I think that it represents the faithfulness of God. Even when humankind have modernized, uh, and has talked themselves out of transcendence because of the incarnation, he remains with us. And there still is. There still is hope and. It goes to what Bart felt is that the starting point, even Alvin planting, I don’t get into this, but planting, uh, you know, basically argued that we start with God as Christians. The, the, the beginning point isn’t proving metaphysically that God exists. The beginning point is in the beginning, God. That’s where we start our theology. That’s where it begins for us. And it’s calling people back to that point to say, Hey, I heard one person say that the. Most least interesting aspect of God is whether or not he exists. Let’s start with the fact that he exists and move from there to find out who he is. Uh, and you know, that is really a great place to begin and, and allow that to form us. And that’s, that’s, I think the incarnation’s important because it starts with God is with us. And that’s what December 1st represents, is that, you know, I cut back to The Lion, The witch and the wardrobe, or a song that actually sings it to say that you know it, they sing and say it’s, it’s uh, it’s always winter and never Christmas. And what I’m saying is that in Novemberton, Christmas is coming. There is an element of hope in the fact that we have the hope of a savior. And so I wanted December 1st to signal. We have hope. We’re not gonna go and arrive at all the answers we’re not gonna know at all. It’s never gonna be clear to us. But that doesn’t do away with the fact that God is with us and there’s something that we can hope. And that is, uh, the promise that he gives is that his son is here. And so, um, that’s what I wanted us to feel. I didn’t want to give an optimistic answer because, because life is still gonna be said. I mean, they are driving, they do drive into the fog. There’s still fog. It’s still. The same town, but we’re reminded that we have hope. And that’s, I think, where we park it and where we leave it. Uh, that, what I’m trying to say is a world without God doesn’t give us anything to hold onto and we are gonna despair and if we live this way, even lead. So you have the, those that are living it principally, like do’s characters or those that are acting on it without principle, like the four characters that I set up. It’s gonna be hopelessness. But if we are quiet and we reflect, I mean, I called for in that church scene, not a rational apologetic. This wasn’t apologetics in the traditional sense where we try to own our neighbor online, but this was rather a contemplative approach to the goodness and the mercy of a creator. Then that in and of itself continues to form us and brings hope to our hearts and to our communities and to our, and to our, uh, our, our lives.

John Dickson:
Chris Palmer, thank you so much.

Reading

I step out into the cold, but its bite no longer gnaws at me. The streets look the same, yet something has shifted. A quiet hope walks beside me. A few steps on, I pause and turn back. The church door sways gently, and I realize someone else has just entered. It seems the columnist was right. He isn’t the only one willing to imagine, to wager, to wonder…Almost as if he knew it, the taxi driver rounds the corner. He doesn’t speak as I climb in, but something in him is different. His eyes, clear now, shine as if the tears have begun to wash away his fear. We pull forward. He gestures to the display on the dash. And there it is. A single date. Simple. Unassuming. But this time, it feels like more than a date. A crack in the gray. A line in the sky. Hope for this cold little town. December 1.

Chris Palmer, ‘A World Without God’.

Undeceptions theme